


Lovely Lost Cause

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-10
Updated: 2011-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:08:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noah was good for something once, and so shall he be again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lovely Lost Cause

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Good for Something Once](https://archiveofourown.org/works/263280) by [candle_beck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck). 



> Originally posted July 2009.

Lovely Lost Cause  
By Candle Beck

 

Back at Pepperdine University, Noah Lowry and Danny Haren walked down to the beach after lunch on a regular Tuesday afternoon, the hottest part of the day. It was November but felt like spring. Haren took off his shirt when sand began to blow across the sidewalks, his wide shoulders peeling from an old sunburn, a yellowing bruise on the meat of his biceps. Lowry stuck his hands in his pockets, squinted almost blind against the sun.

They went down to the beach most days, and this was no different, knee-deep in the water whipping an Aerobie back and forth to each other, hooting and kicking up surf. Lowry's left arm ached pleasantly from the scrimmage he'd pitched four innings of yesterday, a rubbery kinda twinge as he snapped his wrist and let the ring go. He couldn't hear half of what Danny was shouting over the ocean, but he kept nodding along.

Two months into freshman year and this was all regular, unremarkable, and Noah had no real reason to suspect any different. Noah was generally the easy-going type, taking the world as it came and not complaining too much. Life had been good to him so far.

He was sitting on the beach catching his breath while Haren went up to the taco truck on the street to get them some Fantas, idly searching for sharks among the surfers and beach bunnies floating in the water. Sweat stung at his eyes and Lowry rubbed it away with the inside of his wrist, looked back over his shoulder to find Haren stopped short of the truck to talk with a couple of girls. Something happened to Lowry then.

Everything all around him was full-blasted with sunlight but it hit Danny different, or bled out of him, something, but he was over there in his soaked board shorts and nothing else, broad pink-tinged shoulders narrowing to hard chest and stomach, his hair gleaming black and wet-slicked back, clean-white ladykilling grin on his face, the blue of his eyes visible even from where Lowry was--it was as good as Danny Haren would ever look. It was his single best moment, eighteen years old and beautiful, and Lowry fell for him so hard his ears rang.

And it was still like years later when they were almost done with college and still living in the same room. Noah had spent a few months in denial, a few months frozen in panic, and then the better part of a baseball season adapting to it, because that was what you had to do to make it at any level, any time it got harder because it _always_ got harder: make adjustments.

He watched Haren go through two girls a month, and it was difficult at first but over time became oddly calming, constant reminder that he didn't have a prayer and at least it wasn't his fault. Lowry dated girls here and there, on and off, mostly just to kill the time and because it was expected of him, and he learned to predict to the day when she would break up with him, each time some new variation on, you are really obviously hung up on someone else and it's lame, and each time Noah sighed and nodded, not even bothering to deny it.

So now it was junior year and Lowry was still secretly in love with his best friend but he'd conditioned himself to think of it as some sort of medieval quest, a vow of fidelity he'd taken. It was this thing he could pine for and protect fiercely within his own heart, but never actually mention aloud. It seemed defiantly noble, all this loving from afar.

But things hit a breaking point that spring, when they were obsessing both separately and as a pair about the draft, the next six months of their lives. Lowry had trouble sleeping and Haren stayed up to keep him company because Haren was that kind of guy. They played catch barefoot on the silent commons at two in the morning, yawning and bleary-eyed and sapped of color by the fuzzy yellow lights cast sideways across them. They were both going to be drafted and probably pretty well, but Lowry was still wearily petrified to see anything change, half-wanting to punch a brick wall and fuck up his hand so that he'd have an excuse to quit everything and just follow Danny Haren around for the rest of his life.

Lowry was in a bad way. The hopelessness of the whole thing was part of the appeal, a terribly romantic spike of despair every time he dragged his eyes away from Haren making out with the girl of the night in the corner of the bar, but he'd reached his limit.

It burned in him, red-lit along the edges of his mind, this crazy thing he was going to do. He hadn't slept in a couple of days and the draft was bearing down on him like a plane falling out of the sky. He had all kinds of good excuses.

He waited until they were back in their room, tossing their mitts with Haren's busted Chucks on the floor of the closet, and then Lowry grabbed Danny's shoulder and pushed him up against the wall. Haren was wearing his red Skynyrd shirt with the logo chipping off, and Lowry had a hand wrenched in his collar, staring up at his best friend and building his nerve.

Danny kinda laughed, "What? What'd I do?" like Lowry was about to hit him instead of kiss him, and Lowry kept swallowing hard, his mouth working uselessly.

"C'mon, I know you're not drunk," Danny started to say, smile crooked on his face and Noah didn't think, just cupped his hand on Haren's cheek and said rough:

"Danny,"

and he put everything into it, his whole heart offered up plain and free, and Haren's eyes went huge, baffled. He shoved Lowry away from him, Lowry's hand ripping Haren's collar and feeling something rip in his chest too, and then Haren stepped forward into the occluded moonlight fighting its way past the palm trees outside. Haren looked stricken, totally stunned.

"Noah, wh-what, what the fuck?" and he didn't sound angry, his voice kinda thready and warped.

Lowry turned his back, covered his face with both hands. His nose was mashed down and he almost couldn't breathe and he concentrated on that for awhile, slow constant struggle for air. He could feel Haren twitching, freaked out and wanting to bolt but sticking around because they'd been best friends for three years. The history alone was obligation enough.

"Sorry," Lowry said muffled to his palms. "I know you're not, you never, there's never been any reason to think you were but I just, I, I didn't want to never even try."

He bit the flesh at the heel of his hand, shutting himself up before he could say anymore. Stuffed into his throat Lowry could feel all the crazy stupid things that wanted to come out, the mindless romantic in him running loose, but he tamped it down. This wasn't that kind of story.

"You, you're," Danny stammered, and Lowry cut him off, blushing fever-hot and not wanting to hear Haren say it out loud.

"Just a little. For you, anyways. I never. I don't ever do anything with guys, never."

Haren grabbed his shoulder from behind and Lowry jerked, spun around. He tilted away from Haren because he couldn't have Haren's hands on him just now, it wouldn't go well for either of them.

"But, _me_?" Haren's voice was too high, openly flabbergasted. "Why the fuck would you want-" and then he choked, made a sound like he was being strangled and fell silent, his eyes gaping at Lowry.

Lowry bit the inside of his cheek, drilling the knuckle of his thumb into his eye socket. He wasn't looking at Haren, gaze averted to the poster of Fernando Valenzuela rearing back with his eyes rolled up to the sky. Pitching blind, which was what this felt like, facing each other in their dark dorm room with no idea how to fix it.

"I dunno," Lowry said in a mumble. "You're my best friend."

Haren didn't say anything right away, and Lowry snuck a look, found Danny staring at him like he was throwing a perfect game, fascinated and increasingly amazed. It struck a small matchlight in Lowry, pulled his shoulders up straight.

"It's probably not that weird," Lowry said, surprised by how even it sounded. "People are probably fucked up all over. I won't, you don't have to worry about me trying anything again. That was just, just the moment. And really, I'm fine keeping it a secret, and it'll probably work out better for everybody this way."

He smiled, and it didn't hang too badly askew on his face, even if he was experiencing a diminishing sensation in his stomach, something essential sucked out of him. Haren's face was pinched and concerned and he didn't look like he was buying it, but he took Lowry's hand when it was offered in friendship, long fingers pressing on the pulse at the inside of his wrist.

"You're crazy," Haren said low, his heavy eyebrows beetling down. Lowry nodded, teeth in his lip, still trying to hold the smile.

"Not tellin' me anything new, Danny, so why'd you bother?"

And Lowry tugged his hand away from Haren's, turned away. He sat on his bottom bunk with his head bowed, rubbing his palm on his jeans and remembering the rasp of Haren's face, chasing the tingle of it. From the corner of his eye he could see Danny standing numbly by the door for a long moment, and Lowry wasn't quite holding his breath, but it was a near thing.

It worked out, anyway. Haren snapped back to himself after a minute and moved about with a foreign expression on his face, all tipped eyebrows and weak mouth. He shucked his jeans without thought like it was any other night, climbed into the top bunk with his knobby feet disappearing last. Lowry squeezed his eyes shut, bent over with his forehead on his knees wondering what the fuck he'd just done, but then Haren said, kinda distracted, "Night, Noah," and just that quick, he knew it would be all right.

They got drafted and dropped out of college, and on their last night in Malibu they broke into the old mission and went up the spiral stairs to the bell tower, cobwebbed corners and red-eyed bats and empty creaking eaves. They were trying to stay quiet but they were pretty drunk and Lowry for one couldn't stop giggling, rocking his weight to hear the splintered wood sigh.

Danny offered a toast to the San Francisco Giants and Noah offered one to the St. Louis Cardinals. They drank to split-fingered fastballs and change-ups that vanished like smoke, to left-handed hitters with holes on the inside half, to umpires who'd grown up wishing to be pitchers. They drank until their hands felt blurred and the starlight glittering on the ocean was indistinguishable from the smeary gold streetlights caught in the green.

Noah rode a frequency of contented melancholy, eyeing the pale stretch of Haren's throat when he tipped his head back for a drink. They'd arrived at an understanding these past couple of weeks, thankfully unspoken, that Lowry could yearn quietly all he wanted, and Haren would only make fun of him for it when there were no other people around. Nothing important had changed between them, and Lowry was so grateful for that he didn't have the words.

In a month they would both be in Single-A. He would go to Oregon for the short season and Haren would go to Jersey, and Lowry was drunk enough to like the idea of starting out with the whole country between them, thinking diffusely that the distance would cure his poor heart, shape him into the better man he was meant to be.

Then Danny leaned into him, slung his arm around Lowry's shoulders. The damp smell of the old wood filled his head, making him dizzy and he slouched against Haren easily, hating that perfect fit.

"Even crazier," Danny said, half-slurring and picking up a conversation from weeks ago, "crazier than your crazy ass is me, and you know why? You wanna know why, man?"

"Yeah," Lowry answered, eyes shut and Haren's arm draped so heavy and warm around him. "Tell me."

Haren kinda coughed, sighed a little all hoarse and loose. "I think I totally have a giant crush on you too and it sucks because you're a dude. I think if you were a chick I'da been nailing you for years."

Lowry started to laugh, turning his face into Haren's shoulder. He clutched at Haren's shirt and felt his arm tightening where it hung down his chest. Lowry's vision fragmented as if he couldn't breathe, and he was laughing hard now, wild stunned feeling in his chest. It felt sorta like he was losing his mind, but in a good way.

He got under control after a minute and lifted his head to see Danny grinning down at him, soft around the eyes and making a slow fist close in Lowry's stomach. Lowry put his hand on Danny's face again and Danny didn't flinch this time, only grinned wider as Lowry leaned up and pressed a kiss to his cheek, open-mouthed and vaguely desperate but somehow still chaste.

So that was okay too, and they walked home to the same place for the last time that night, close enough to bump arms and not talking. They said goodbye in the student parking lot the next morning, sunglasses on so they wouldn't have to meet each other's eyes, hugging seconds too long in the blasted light.

They managed to stay best friends throughout their minor league careers, though their schedules and timezones worked persistently against them, the technology kept getting better and better, never out of touch unless you were in a plane and they were both still in the bus leagues.

One night in August Lowry's team bus broke down on the way to Boise, a great clonking yank forward as something in the engine burst and dirty-colored smoke began bellowing out of the grill. A sixteen year old infielder from Honduras was standing in the aisle and got thrown down, gashed his cheek open, but that was the only damage and cured by a couple of butterfly bandages, and it gave him "Scarface" as a pretty cool nickname for the rest of his baseball life. They milled around outside for three hours waiting for the second bus to come pick them up, games of pepper starting up on the deserted highway.

Lowry snuck around to the back and climbed on top of the bus without anyone seeing him, camped out up there with his cell phone and six trillion stars, Danny Haren murmuring half-asleep and mostly incoherent in his ear.

On top of a broken-down bus on the highway to Boise, sitting cross-legged beside a scummy-green hotel pool in Yakima, hiding in an alley outside a Vancouver bar--on the phone with Danny Haren. Lowry lived so he could tell his best friend all about it.

It was always how's your game, how's your motion looking, what new pitches have they taught you, and I can throw that, I learned how to throw that _years_ ago. Danny ragging on him from 2500 miles away felt like a full-body hug.

They talked about baseball because it was the bulk of their experience, and they told the same stories from Pepperdine over and over again, the same nights replayed and reshaped in memory until they gleamed like icons, some bygone age. A couple times a week, Danny got drunk and called Noah to ask what kind of candy he should get from the gas station.

Lowry came to terms with it sometime in Double-A, when he was in Norwich, Connecticut, and Danny was still stuck down in the Carolina League. They'd stumbled upon the strangest form of friendship he'd ever known, where they were both sorta in love with each other but Noah was the only one physically able to act on it. It was clearly some kind of sick joke of God's part, making Danny so irretrievably straight, but it was going to be okay. Noah had the important parts of him, he didn't need the sex. He'd always felt like he was meant for epic things, and this, this lovely lost cause, this was starting to look like his life's work.

In the off-seasons they came back to Southern California, their childhood homes ninety miles apart and the weather always the exact same for both of them. Lowry learned every foot of the drive between Ventura and West Covina, sun setting in his eyes going out and rising in his eyes coming back. He memorized the order of dozens of exits and chanted it to himself like a psychotic's catechism. He was seeing Haren tonight. He was happy, or pretty close, at least.

Before the season started in 2003, Lowry stole Haren's red Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt with the rip in the collar. 'Stole' was not the right word, exactly, because he wore it around Haren at least once and saw Danny tick his eyebrows in recognition, but he never asked Lowry to give it back. Danny never said anything about it at all, which made Noah think that the shirt was probably his now.

They both made the bigs that year. Haren got called up by the Cards first, at the end of June, and he spent the last half of the season getting lit up pretty bad and not caring at all, describing every pitch to Lowry, every foul tip. Lowry kept having trouble getting his breath when Haren was talking about being a major league ballplayer. He wasn't sure whether it was the proximity of his own future, or just the crazy light-filled note running all through Haren's voice.

Lowry was in Fremont, wishing on shooting stars and eyelashes and pitching brilliantly, painlessly, his left arm formed into a magic thing. He was happy, almost all the way this time.

The Giants called him up after the rosters expanded in September, and he found some kind of fantastic higher level, his body whittled down by the impossibly long season but he located in himself just enough extra, this hidden cache of change-ups packed into his shoulder. He pitched out of the bullpen four times, six innings without a run, and at the end of the season they said to him casually, like it was _nothing_ , "See you next year, kid."

Lowry and Haren both started in Trip-A in the spring; both made it back to the bigs by midseason. Haren said, "Here to stay, baby," and Lowry yelled at him for jinxing it, and then they talked for the next five hours, until the sun was coming up and Lowry's voice was a pale little rasp.

He was a starting pitcher on a major league baseball team and he started his career out 7-0, better than anyone in San Francisco history. There had always been that itching doubt in the back of his mind, that he'd make it to the Show pitching as well as he possibly could, and the batters, all those fearsome baseball-card idols would just be better than he was. Lowry had nightmares of launched home runs, scorched down-the-line doubles, but he was here now and they couldn't hit him. They couldn't _touch_ him.

He'd never been happy before, never been close. This was a whole other plane.

The Giants won ninety-one games in 2004, but lost the division torturously on the second-to-last day of the season, down in Los Angeles in the wicked white and blue night. It hurt, but not as badly as Lowry was expecting, not with the way they talked about him, the way they talked about next season.

Lowry went to Phoenix for instrux, giddy and kinda removed, watching himself from the outside. When he got drunk, very late at night when he couldn't call Danny because Danny's team was still in it and they had a game tomorrow, sometimes Noah got badly scared, because everything was going just like he'd planned, as good as he could have dreamed, and he couldn't really trust it. He understood how narrative arcs worked. There was a reversal of fortunes ahead of him, but he could only see it when he was drunk.

And then the St. Louis Cardinals won the pennant.

And then they lost the World Series.

Lowry wasn't sure if he could count that as his own tragedy. His team had gone home earlier, but he knew Haren felt worse at this moment than he could possibly conceive.

He was back in California by then, and there at LAX to meet Haren's flight. Haren's hair was greasy under his cap and his eyes were sunken, hollowed. He hooked his arm around Lowry's shoulders at baggage claim and leaned almost all his weight on him, and Lowry rooted himself to the spot, made himself sturdy and trustworthy.

It was only a couple of weeks before Haren was able to shake the postseason, and Lowry thought that Danny was like sand, smoothed over so easily and by nothing more than wind. Every third person seemed to be wearing a Red Sox cap that winter, and by Thanksgiving it didn't even make Haren flinch anymore.

They met up in Malibu, roughly halfway between, and sat on the beach drinking like they were freshmen again, screwing fists into the sand to make pockets for their bottles. Shoulders knocking together, Haren kept saying he saw sharks in the water even though Lowry never believed him.

That was where they were about a week before Christmas, sitting on the beach keeping an eye on the ocean. The winds had come screaming down the coast and they had a cheap red kite bought from a kid in the parking lot, flickering and dancing above them. Danny's hair was blown off his face and he was grinning like the Cards had actually gone the distance and the kite string was tied to the heavy gold ring around his finger.

Noah was happy too, happy beyond the telling of it, but there was a black shadow growing behind him, because he wasn't a kid anymore and the romance of the whole thing was beginning to wear through. He wasn't thinking about that, wouldn't allow it, stubborn like a teenager but that wouldn't last either.

Haren's phone, half-buried in the sand, burred to life, and he passed the kite's reel over to Lowry, picked up and learned that he was now the property of the Oakland Athletics.

Lowry dropped the reel. The kite tugged it immediately away, rolling down the beach and unspooling fast, kicking and leaping up higher and higher the lighter it got. Lowry shouted and took off after it, catching hold just before the surf took it. He came back up the beach to find Haren looking poleaxed, blinking up at him with his phone loosely clutched in his hand.

Lowry dropped to his knees, grinned at him hugely. "Danny, this is excellent news. Dude. Oakland's like fifteen minutes away. It's _right there_."

Haren considered that, his face scanning, eyebrows tipped up kinda questioning and helpless. He scratched at the little scruff of a beard he'd let come in, ran a hand through his hair. He was searching for his bearings.

"But, we, we just played in the World Series," Haren said, still stuck in the past.

"Oakland'll get there."

"How? That, it was _Mark Mulder_ they just gave up, for me and Kiko and hot-shot bush leaguer. And wasn't it like freakin' yesterday that they got rid of Tim Hudson? The fuck have I just gotten myself into?"

Lowry punched Haren's knee, still more pleased than otherwise, thinking, _right there_.

"You're a better pitcher than Mulder is," he told Haren. "Will be, anyway. Billy Beane did it to get you, man."

Haren shook his head automatically, moving ahead in his mind in great fits and starts. "I, I need to get a place, and fuck, I'm going to Phoenix in the spring now, this is the craziest shit."

Lowry just grinned at him, this high feeling like a chime ringing in his chest. Haren squinted at him, suspicious, said, "What," and Lowry told him plainly:

"I wanna kiss you but obviously I'm not gonna. This is gonna be so great."

Laughing, Haren fell back on his elbows, shaking his head in amazement. He tipped his face to the sun and Lowry's cheeks ached from smiling so hard.

"Nothing cheers me up like reminders that you're completely queer for me, Noah."

Lowry pounded his fist joyfully on Haren's knee. "Come live with me in San Francisco."

"You think you get me to the Motherland and I'll turn completely queer for _you_?"

"You _are_ completely queer for me, Danny, you just don't have the sack to do anything about it." Lowry tugged at the edge of Haren's board shorts, flicked at his leg. "It's okay, though."

Haren sat up, batted Lowry's hand away. He angled Lowry a sideways grin, looking a little less taken aback. Just uprooted and flung to the far side of the country, but Haren got over it quickly because at the end of the day, he was coming home, back to California once more.

"So," Danny said, stealing a sip of Lowry's beer. His phone lit up in the sand again but he didn't even glance at it, eyes intent on his best friend. "Tell me about this place we're gonna live."

Before they could get to that, though, there was spring training. They drove out to Phoenix in a two-car caravan, each with a bulky yellow plastic walkie-talkie propped on the dash so they could talk and insult each other's musical tastes. The desert had never appealed to Lowry more, the primal edge on everything and the knowledge that if you got far enough out and just started walking, you'd die of thirst before seeing another human face. He was in an odd fatalistic kind of mood a lot of the time, dreaming up macabre mass casualty events that the two of them might barely survive.

They checked into the same extended-stay hotel and got dinner, stayed up till one playing PSP and watching a marathon of _Saturday Night Live_ reruns and only drinking in moderation. Saying goodnight at the door, Haren told him, "I have a good feeling about this," and Lowry said, "Yeah, fuck, me too."

Haren met up with him at the bar after his first full day with his new team, shooting some commercials with the other pitchers and doing a short session. Haren came in already laughing, collapsed into the booth across from Lowry and rolled his head in his hand.

"Jesus Christ, you won't believe what happened to me today," Haren said, and that was how Lowry found out Barry Zito was gay.

"Mad déjà vu, man," Haren was telling him, and Lowry was watching his mouth move. "Is there, like, some gay boy manual tellin' you how to hit on straight guys?"

Lowry recoiled, faintly horrified. "He did what now?"

"Basically the same thing you did, except it didn't take him three years. I'm having trouble deciding if that makes you slow or him crazy."

Vast amounts of alcohol seemed called for. Lowry waved down a waitress kinda frantically, ordered a fuckload of shots as Danny smirked at him from across the table. Lowry didn't know why he was so surprised. He knew what Danny looked like to a filthy-minded teammate.

"Is that. That's gonna be kinda weird now, yeah?" Lowry asked, sounding mostly regular. "He's like the ace of your rotation and stuff."

Haren shrugged. "Whatever. He's fine. I think he probably is a little nuts, 'cause he just threw it out there ten hours after meeting me, like, without knowing I wouldn't kick the shit out of him or go telling everybody or something. But I just shot him down and he was like, ah well, saw that coming. No harm no foul, you know?"

Lowry nodded carefully, not wanting to give away more than he already had. He was trying to picture Zito, kept seeing him how he'd looked winning the Cy Young two years ago, unshaven and bed-headed in his press conference and Lowry's mother making him promise that if he were ever so blessed as to have such a thing happen to him, he'd at least wear a collared shirt.

"You still gonna be friends with him, then?" he asked. Haren smiled, kicked him under the table.

"Still friends with you, ain't I? Hell, I'm almost getting used to this shit."

Lowry was somewhat reassured, not wholly sure why but willing to take it on spec. He didn't like the idea of some other guy, some more-current teammate also having a crush on Haren, but he was pretty secure in knowing that if Danny ever decided to give dick a try, Noah would be the first and only name on the list. Miracles didn't actually happen in real life, of course, but a boy could dream.

Haren took Lowry along to hang out with his A's teammates because the Giants' median age was thirty-five and the entire Oakland organization was basically a frat house with corporate sponsorship. Lowry kept quiet like he always did when he was meeting new people, especially in groups. He hung back, his cap pulled down over his eyes, and observed, let Danny tell their stories for him.

Barry Zito was exactly as Lowry expected, kinda manic and dumb and painfully obvious in the way he looked at Haren, followed his broad shoulders through the crowd. Zito chewed on the lip of his glass, staring at Lowry's best friend, and Lowry rolled his eyes so hard he almost hurt himself, thinking that he had never been that bad.

Zito kept pestering Lowry for factoids and anecdotes about Haren, wanting to know about those split-sole black Chucks of his and whether he talked in his sleep. Lowry went along with it because it was a bit fascinating, like talking to his own nineteen year old incarnation, Zito's huge eyes, his eager mouth.

And he was very good-looking, Lowry caught himself thinking absently, and then suddenly his mind was sharp and clear because outside of Haren he never really thought about guys in those terms. Rarely, there were men that he felt compelled to fuck around with in bar bathrooms without even learning their names first, but that was different than looking at Zito and hearing the back of his mind report, _goddamn but he's pretty_.

They had a lot of time to waste down in Phoenix, and Danny kept bringing Noah around, until everybody got used to him and he talked a little bit more. Zito was always watching him and Haren, narrow-eyed, trying to figure out how closely they fit.

In San Francisco, they moved into the same apartment building, Haren taking the place directly above Lowry's. Lowry was ham-fisted as they assembled furniture on the floor, punch-drunk from having Danny so close again. He dreamt up crazy gadgets, tin-can telephones between the windows, some kind of pulley system for little messages and stuff, but they ended up just running up and down the stairs, crashing on each other's couches and living out of each other's refrigerators, roommates again for all intents and purposes.

Haren liked his new team a lot, hooligan stories trickling back to Lowry, idiotically reckless pranks and kangaroo court held every other week. The A's couldn't win, ten games under .500 and still struggling, but they didn't talk about that. They could read each other better than the weather at this point, their conversations choreographed and in shorthand.

Their teams faced each other in the Bay Bridge Series and it was the first time they'd both been home at the same time in a while, and so after the day game Haren and Lowry went down to their complex's pool for the last few long hours of daylight. Zito was hanging around, as he seemed to do a lot, just kinda occupying space in Danny's orbit like if he did it often enough Danny would eventually trip and fall on his dick. Lowry wished he could find Zito more amusing than he did.

Zito probably felt the same about him, and when he caught Lowry gazing at Haren floating on his back in the water, he came and sat on the cement beside him, eyes narrowed and wet hair shoved back off his forehead.

"He's not, you know," Zito told him in a muted tone, and Lowry bit into the inside of his lip to keep a straight face. He breathed out careful and slow.

"I know," he said. He looked away, covered a smirk with his hand. As if that were _news_. As if that weren't the defining obstacle of Lowry's whole goddamn life.

But Zito seemed somehow pleased by Lowry's response, a different kind of calculating respect in his eyes when he looked at him, and Lowry felt it hot under his collar, his fingers itching at the hem of his shirt. Zito's full attention was difficult to withstand for too long.

The season rolled on and Oakland started playing better, San Francisco mirroring them on a downward slide, and Lowry was distracted by baseball for awhile, creating movement at the tail of his two-seam like carving a hook out of marble. He and Danny talked on the computer, mostly, and sometimes by dozens of text messages a day, cycling briefly away from each other.

But then he came back to San Francisco and the A's were still in town, Danny already drunk when Noah got to his place and Zito was there, smiling half-heartedly at Lowry, wearing a battered white shirt and jeans with tears across both knees.

Lowry focused on Haren, funny hammered Danny with his face Irish-glowing and his bad jokes coming machine-gun quick. He was working on ignoring these strange responses that Zito called up out of him.

They'd all three gotten pretty well obsessed with _Lost_ , and they watched a couple episodes, sitting in a row on the couch with their feet kicked up on the coffee table. Lowry got sorta loaded, eyes skidding around from Haren's loose body, his sloppy smile, over to Zito slouched all dark-eyed and tired-looking at the other end of the couch. He couldn't follow what was happening on the show, but it was still really good.

"You still got some of those cookies from your mom, Dan?" Zito asked, and Lowry's attention zeroed in because Danny's mom's cookies were the shit, but there was no answer, and they both looked to find Haren asleep with his arms crossed and his chin resting on his chest.

Zito said, "Aw," and Lowry felt a wide grin burst suddenly across his face, stupidly endeared to Zito in that moment, Zito and Danny and everything, the whole world. Zito's eyes went big, taken aback, and then he favored Lowry with a grin of his own. It changed Zito's face, lit him up, an uncertain feeling racing through Lowry's chest.

They carried Haren to his room, huffing and cursing and bumping into the doorframe. Heaved him onto the bed and stood over him, talking just to fill the air and looking at the low place revealed on Haren's stomach, his shirt all twisted up. Haren had his hands in fists with his thumbs on the insides like a kid, and Zito kept glancing at Lowry, making heat curl in him. He could kinda guess what was about to happen.

"You see how his hands are like that?" Noah said, his throat dry, eyes locked on Danny because he'd wanted Danny so long, it was nothing new and nothing that could scare him, not like looking at Zito might. "He always does that when he's asleep."

Zito took Lowry's chin in his hand, lifted his face and kissed him hard on the mouth. Lowry buried a hand in Zito's hair, kissed him back open and quick, deeper than hell.

Lowry let Zito take him down to the floor, flushing all over and twisting his hands in Zito's shirt, pulling it away from his body. Zito licked the birthmark under his eye and it made Lowry shake.

He was going to do this. He rolled to get Zito under him, felt Zito spread his legs to let him slide between, and Lowry pushed his face into Zito's throat, breathing heavy and ragged. He was going to do this, yes, and it wasn't going to be like the guys he'd fucked around with all frantic and anonymous in dingy bathrooms, because he knew Zito's name and history and what pitches he threw, and then Zito was pulling his face up and kissing him again and none of it mattered. Lowry lost his train of thought. He lost everything that wasn't Zito's mouth on his, Zito's big hands shoved up the back of his shirt.

Lowry ended up sucking him off right there on the floor next to Danny's bed, Danny's foot in its white sock sticking out over the edge. But he wasn't thinking about Danny, not really, not with Zito's hips shuddering in his hands, Zito's fingers scrabbling through his hair. Lowry took him down, took him as deep as he could, his mind all fucked up and overloaded on sensation, the slick and unmistakable reality of it, scent and taste and weight and Zito crying out too loud at the end, spooking them both pretty bad.

Zito came back to his apartment with him that night, and then he stayed there for the next two days. Lowry had never done anything with the same guy more than once, and it was novel and exciting again, like girls had been in high school before Danny showed up and ruined him for anything soft ever again. He learned Zito, learned what he could do to a man's body.

Zito was much less irritating when he had his hand down Lowry's pants, predictably enough. There were actually several different ways to shut him up if you were willing to play dirty (check), and after he'd gotten off he was chill, pliable and sleepy and lolling around like a cat in sunlight. Noah could put him in front of cartoons with a box of sugar cereal and not have to worry about him for awhile, and when Zito eventually got restless and came nosing around into Lowry's business, it was usually because he wanted to blow him, and these were sacrifices that Lowry was all too capable of making.

Before the A's left town to go on a swing through the Midwest, Haren had them both over again for macaroni and cheese that he somehow managed to scorch inedible even though Lowry had been making that stuff since he was, like, seven, and so they called for Chinese food instead. Zito dared him to get the super spicy by-request-only option, and Lowry was bound by the laws of boyhood to accept, even though it nearly cost him the use of his sinuses.

His face still felt too hot, a thin band of sweat at his hairline, when he and Zito went back downstairs to his apartment. Zito pushed him up against the door as soon as it was closed, kinda laughing against Lowry's mouth, pushing his shirt up and hooking his hands in Lowry's belt. Lowry kissed him and Zito's mouth was blessedly cool, sweet from the ice cream sandwiches they'd had, Zito's tongue curling against his own and making him shiver from cold.

They made it as far as the living room, and then Zito fucked him for the first time on his back with his legs wrapped around Zito's body and his hands braced on the arm of the couch. Zito was bare to the waist, jeans tugged down far enough, and Lowry's pants were hanging off one ankle. He was still wearing his shirt, and he would have felt ridiculous but there was no room for that in him, not right now. Lowry kept pushing back helplessly against Zito, moans jerked out of his open mouth and his whole body rapt with what was happening inside. He had to keep his eyes shut, his face turned to the side, because he couldn't watch it happening, you couldn't ask that of him.

Coming down, his thoughts honing into clarity again, Lowry had a thought that was about ten years overdue and maybe completely obvious. He wasn't just in love with Danny and ruined for all girls everywhere; he was pretty much just _gay_.

He felt a little disappointed. His situation had been so complex and borderline epic before, so much more interesting. This, people went through this kind of thing every day, it was as common as a cold. But he could see how it made sense. None of the girls he'd fooled around with in high school and college had ever had the effect that Danny and now Zito had on him, and he certainly wasn't in love with _Zito_ , that was for goddamn sure. Those guys in the bar bathrooms, the ones he'd picked up because they might have had hands like Danny's or pale blue eyes or heavy eyebrows, each a really good excuse on his own but they all had one thing in common and that was a dick, and maybe Lowry was actually just really, really dumb.

Zito's was still lying on top of him, his head on Lowry's chest and his damp hair brushing under his chin, and Lowry tapped his fingers contemplatively on Zito's shoulder, thinking that life was so strange, so unexpected no matter what you did. The small heat each time Zito exhaled made Lowry's skin prickle.

"You done that before?" Zito asked, muffled.

"Shouldn't you have asked that before you did it?"

"No, 'cause then if you haven't we have to talk about it for at least a little while and I wasn't in the mood for talking. Anyway, figured you'd take a swing if it wasn't your scene." Zito paused, his wristwatch scratching at Harden's side. "Hey, excellent deflection of the question, by the way."

"Clearly not," Lowry told him. "And the answer is yes. Of course."

That was a lie and not a very well-delivered one, but Zito couldn't tell. Zito didn't really know him at all.

Zito's hands spread out on Lowry's sides, spanning his ribs and finding the tender lines of muscle between. Lowry let his fingers tangle in Zito's hair, thinking about how he'd never felt comfortable holding girls, never known where to put his hands or if they were okay resting on his bony shoulder, and yes, maybe very very gay because this lying naked with a _guy_ on top of him felt completely natural.

Lowry sighed, chest rising and making Zito's hair tickle against his mouth.

"You fuck around with other ballplayers a lot?" Zito asked him next.

"You're the first, lucky you."

"'cept Danny."

Lowry twitched, his hand snagging in Zito's hair. "I never fucked around with Danny, you know that."

Zito kinda laughed, warm little puffs against Lowry's chest. "Everything but, though, huh? Never met anybody so hung up on someone they never even fucked around with."

"Shut up, would you." Lowry gave him a brief hard tug and Zito hissed between his teeth. He was smiling, Lowry could see, the corner of Zito's mouth upturned. Lowry didn't know what the fuck went on in Zito's head.

They were both quiet for a minute, Zito's thumbs rubbing the points of Lowry's hipbones slowly, almost meditatively, breathing out steady and calm. Lowry was drifting, wondering how long he'd have to wait before asking Zito to fuck him again if he didn't want to seem like a slut.

"Anyway," Zito said eventually, picking up right where they'd left off. "I think it's adorable that our hopeless crushes on the same straight guy have brought us together. I think this would make a fantastic made-for-TV movie."

Lowry couldn't help his snort of laughter. Maybe it was all the orgasms, but Zito was starting to say some pretty amusing things.

"You're really kinda weird, huh?" Lowry said. Zito nodded, agreeably sated, biting at Lowry's chest and grinning. Lowry wanted to kiss him, and so he did.

Towards morning, Lowry said they should tell Haren about the two of them, which was his way of obliquely warning Zito that he would probably let it slip some night after drunk-dialing Haren from the other side of the country. Zito wasn't exactly amenable to the idea, and he was the one who had to see Haren every day, so Lowry let it slide for the moment.

Zito left with barely enough time to catch his flight and Lowry returned to his ever-consuming job, the rhythm of every fifth day. His left arm buzzed and hummed, palpably warmer under the skin, and there was movement in everything he threw these days, this trapdoor on the inside corner that he kept nailing again and again. This was exactly what he'd been expecting of major league baseball, even if his team wasn't very good, neither was the division, and everybody was kinda in it, ten games under .500 or no.

The A's were playing as if they'd been ignited. All through the stultifying heat of summer, the forceful gusts of wind off the ocean, the A's kept winning and winning, tearing out of the cellar of their division on crazy bursts, five games in a row, seven, twelve out of fourteen and coming home to the Coliseum, until they finally caught the Angels in August, seesawing back and forth with them for the last six weeks.

Noah heard about it from Danny, and now from Zito too, Zito who apparently did 90% of his communication via text message, updates on the game and the weather and his teammates and all the other random shit that populated his brain. They sounded like they were having an awful lot of fun. Lowry didn't want to live secondhand, wasn't interested in envy because what could you do, these first six years when you were just an asset to be used or traded at a whim. It was just the luck of the draft.

There wasn't much opportunity to meet up with Zito, but they made the most of it when they did. They jerked each other off in the men's room at the San Francisco airport once, when their paths into and out of town happened to cross. One time Lowry's game in Philadelphia got rained out and he rented a car sometime near midnight, drove to New York City because the A's were in for a three-game set at Yankee Stadium. He called Zito from the sidewalk and Zito came down beaming and soft-haired and slow from being woken up but not caring, so eager his hands shook. He dragged Lowry around the corner to the nearest shadowy city park and pressed him to a tree, dropped to his knees. The weather didn't hold out as long as Noah did, the sky cracking open and drenching the two of them and Noah was laughing, both hands hidden in Zito's soaked hair.

They had thirteen hours together in Noah's Los Angeles hotel room when Zito was down to play Anaheim. Lowry begged off dinner with the boys, claiming a headache like a housewife avoiding sex, and then he snuck down the back stairs and let Zito in the side door, Zito hilariously disguised in all black with his sunglasses on even though it was nighttime. Zito's teammates were covering for him; they had all night.

They were familiar to each other by then, having tried most things at least once, and Lowry felt admirably well-settled into his gayness, felt like he was starting to get pretty good at it. He knew the places Zito wanted him to leave marks, and when he wanted to be held down by the throat, and how crazy it made him when Lowry twisted his hands in Zito's hair and pulled his head back. They spent hours on it, fucked each other out until they could barely move.

Lowry was lying mostly asleep on Zito's arm, liking everything about this. He couldn't for the life of him figure out why this shit had taken him so long, but he supposed it had to do with Danny Haren. He'd always been hell on Lowry's big-picture perspective.

"Hey," Zito mumbled. He tugged feebly and Lowry rolled off his arm, blinking fuzzily. Zito smiled at him, touched his hair with the backs of his fingers. "You goin' home for the winter?"

Lowry nodded, yawned into the pillow. "Getting a place on the beach. Not even looking if it's more'n a five minute walk."

"'s a fair requirement, I think."

Zito was looking at him, an indecipherable expression on his face, gaze overly intent considering the hour. He did that sometimes, just _looked_ at Lowry like he was a puzzle of some kind. It made Lowry a little uncomfortable, because he really wasn't as complex as Zito seemed to think, no good reason for anyone to stare at him that much.

"I'ma be in Van Nuys, you know," Zito told him. "We should meet up."

"Hm," Lowry said non-commitally, and got up to get one of the apples he'd put in the mini-fridge. He ate a lot of apples as the season narrowed down, because he was antsy and fidgety and hungry all the time and he couldn't just have a zillion fun-size Snickers like he wanted to because he was a professional athlete and stuff.

He got back in bed, sitting cross-legged with his back to the headboard, chomping away. Zito butted his head into Lowry's hip and craned his neck, opened his mouth for a bite. Lowry held the apple for him and juice burst onto his wrist, sticky and sweet as he licked it away. Zito was still looking at him, eyes slitted.

"If you invite me to your housewarming party, I'll bring hundred year old Scotch," Zito said. Lowry cocked an eyebrow.

"Housewarming party? That's the gayest thing you've said all night, which, wow."

Zito snorted, turning onto his stomach. His ears were red like they got when he was embarrassed, which Lowry found a little strange. He was getting used to that with Zito, the persistent echoes and hollow rings that seemed to trail him like bound spirits. Zito was usually working off a completely different map.

Lowry finished up his apple, chucked it across the room into the wastebasket. "Dude, did you see that? That was really impressive, what I just did there."

"You mean you threw something and it went where you wanted it to? What do you do for a living again?"

Smacking him, Lowry rubbed his sticky hands through Zito's hair, over his bare shoulders and back. Zito kept his face angled away, the flush spreading down his neck and up his cheek, but that was just him starting to get turned on again, Lowry knew well enough.

He fit the heels of his hands under Zito's shoulder blades, let his weight bear down until a low groan was pressed out of him. Zito's eyes were closed, a pinched line drawn on his forehead.

Lowry leaned down, brushed his lips on Zito's face. "You wanna go again?"

Zito didn't answer for a second, and Lowry nosed against the back of his neck, nipped at the high points of his spine. Lowry was thinking about how he wanted it this time, Zito on his back and Lowry astride, both hands braced on the headboard for the right leverage, and he almost missed Zito answering with the slightest break in his voice:

"You never have to ask, dude."

Lowry never told Haren what was going on with him and Zito. The right moment never presented itself, or was forcibly ignored when it did, and after awhile he forgot why he'd thought Danny had to know in the first place. It had seemed logical, maybe, because Haren knew the backstory and should know about the latest not-so-surprising twist too, but Lowry could see that that was kinda bullshit now. Haren knew the backstory because he _was_ the backstory; this didn't have anything to do with him anymore.

He didn't talk to Haren as much as he used to, anyway. Haren had a new girlfriend named Jessica and she was apparently extremely engrossing. Haren was always running late to meet her, or just sitting down to dinner with her, or getting a call from her while he was already on the phone with Noah and ditching him flat. Danny was infatuated and distracted and neglecting his best friend something awful. Noah didn't want to get pissed off at him, and was kinda surprised to find that he wasn't, really.

Every time he looked at his phone, he had a new text message from Zito, and they were always stupid and pointless and a waste of electrons, but it had switched over at some point from annoying to endearing. Lowry wasn't sure what to make of that.

Then one day in September, Lowry got home from the ballpark to find Zito asleep in the lobby of his apartment building. Zito was conked out on the tiny bench in the defunct phone booth, his legs stretching out onto the shiny floor. Lowry kicked him awake, watching Zito twitch and bang his head and mutter to himself.

"Hey," Zito said, faint sheen of hesitation on his face like he couldn't quite remember what he was doing there. "You guys win?"

"No. Come on." Lowry pulled him up, steered him to the elevators. "You catch a ride with Danny? What'd you tell him?"

Zito shook his head, yawning into his elbow. "Let him get ahead of me, caught a cab. Just, I know you're leaving in the morning, haven't seen you. I dunno."

They got in the elevator and Zito immediately hung his arm around Noah's shoulders, leaned on him all heavy and warm. Lowry stood straight under the pressure, let Zito grope him a bit because he still wasn't all the way awake and anyway, it was a nice way to be welcomed home.

Inside, Zito pushed Lowry ahead of him into the bedroom, tugging at his coat and shirt, sliding his hand under Lowry's belt. Lowry shoved him onto the bed so he could toss his bag and get undressed, Zito leaned back on his elbows and watching steadily, dark gathering heat in his eyes. Lowry grinned at him, threw his T-shirt at Zito's head.

Zito grabbed hold of him as soon as he was close enough, dragged him down and wrapped around him arms and legs and everything, and Lowry huffed out a laugh, caught off-guard because Zito was just hugging him, face jammed into the bend of his shoulder. Lowry waited for him to move, open his mouth, run his hands down, but Zito only held on, breathtakingly tight.

"What're you doing?" Lowry said into Zito's hair. Zito shook his head, his cheek rasping on the skin of Lowry's throat.

"Shut up for a second," Zito mumbled, flexed his arms against Lowry's sides.

Lowry obliged him, confused but not as badly as he wanted to be. He was maybe kinda slow on the uptake but he was trying to get better at that. He took stock of the moment his life had brought him to, white stucco ceiling and wrinkled blue sheets, the calm feeling spreading through his chest and the heat rushing all over his skin because Zito was touching him everywhere. Zito was holding him like it meant something, and Lowry thought that was probably because it did.

"Fuck," he breathed out. His hand on Zito's back clawed, and Zito flinched.

"I'm okay," Zito said right away.

"I know," Lowry answered, thinking, _you're also in love with me_ , and he laughed out loud, amazed.

Zito lifted his face, studied Lowry with his lower lip pulled between his teeth. Lowry pushed his hand into Zito's hair, saw his eyes go thin with pleasure. Lowry smiled at how easy he was, wondering if Zito knew it himself, and then wondering if he was in love with Zito too and deciding he probably wasn't. He wouldn't have had to wonder about it if he were.

"You're not mad I came over?" Zito asked. The tension was seeping out of him, his grip on Lowry loosening, molding them together. Lowry half-shrugged.

"Depends what you're gonna do for me."

"Anything," and that was too quick, too sure, something burning overbright in Zito's face, and Lowry got a tiny snaking sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, but then he kissed Zito and it went away for a little while.

He made Zito chocolate chip pancakes in the morning, and Zito watched him like the earth might swallow Noah if he looked away. The back of Noah's neck itched, his fingers ill-coordinated, very conscious of the scrutiny. He shot Zito a few glares and Zito blushed, commenced staring at the comics page, his eyes trained and unmoving. Lowry sighed to the cabinets. He didn't know what to do; no one had ever been in love with him before and he'd never really anticipated it in any kind of concrete way.

He ended up not saying anything. He fed Zito and let him hang around while he packed for the road trip, let Zito push him against the wall and go down on him before he had to leave. Lowry filled his hands, tipped his head back and groaned Zito's name experimentally, felt the vibration of his answering moan on his cock and Lowry almost lost it right there.

It was good that he was going on the road. He needed some fucking space.

The season was almost over. A lousy team was going to win the National League West but it wasn't going to be the Giants. The Angels were just a few of their wins or Oakland's losses away from clinching that side of the slate, and Lowry figured he probably hadn't factored in Zito's state of mind after six straight seasons in contention, six straight seasons going home early. The A's weren't out of it just yet, but Zito'd already spent most of his baseball miracles. He was getting cagier as his pitching skills deteriorated, and he must have seen it coming, grabbing hold of Noah like the last rung on a broken ladder.

It didn't really matter why, Lowry decided as the plane landed at Reagan International, the Mall white-lit and the Capitol Dome glowing in the distance. Zito had a bunch of mental problems and one of them was evidently falling in love with the least suitable person he could find, with which Lowry could kinda sympathize, but it wasn't important, the important thing was that they hardly ever saw each other and the off-season was no kind of promise. The cracks in Zito were starting to show. Lowry didn't even want to think about his own self, the blown windows other people must have seen when they looked at him.

They got to the hotel and all the guys were pretty ramped up because none of them had ever come to this city to play baseball before, everything seeming shiny and new. Lowry wasn't in the mood, it was just another stupid hotel, another stupid East Coast city with awful soup-like weather even after the sun went down. Half the team headed out to the bars seeking cures for jetlag, but Lowry stayed behind, preferring the quiet.

He got room service and watched part of an Adam Sandler movie on cable, but sitting around didn't take, his knee jogging spastically under his hand. He went wandering, took his phone and iPod with him, and found a back stairwell to climb without clear purpose, a roof door with a busted lock for him to shoulder open, gravel to crunch under his sneakers. The thick air stuck in his chest, smothered him for a second before he remembered how to breathe it.

It was nice out, clear-skied and a few scattered lit windows in the office buildings, street traffic shushing below. There were no skyscrapers, no buildings taller than about ten stories, and Lowry puzzled over that for awhile.

It was eight o'clock in California and the A's had already lost their game, so Noah called Danny. It rang almost through to voicemail and then he picked up, half-shouting "Noah!" like he always did when Lowry called him. Lowry hid his grin behind his phone.

"Hey man, I'm in D.C. Do you know why the buildings are so short here?"

Haren made a faint humming sound. "We were there in June, but that was my first time. I didn't even notice, just seemed to fit."

"Not so helpful, then."

"You check out the stadium yet?"

"It's a forty-year-old multipurpose, seen one you seen 'em all."

"Hey," Haren said with a joking edge of sharpness. "I play in one of those, watch your mouth."

"You only like it for the foul ground."

"'s true."

They were quiet for a second, and Lowry picked up bits of gravel to chuck into the alley. He could hear the television going behind Haren's voice, wondered if he was at his place or one of his teammates'.

"So how's it going?" Lowry asked, odd tugging feeling in his stomach because he felt like he shouldn't have to ask Haren that.

"Oh, you know." Haren exhaled against the receiver. "Arm's about to fall off. Gonna take some kinda divine intervention for us to pull it out and then what's the reward, get to pitch for another month. It might kill me, honestly."

But he sounded vaguely joyful, and Lowry knew not to take his words at face value. If the A's made the playoffs, Danny Haren would want the ball every single game.

"Whiner," Lowry said off-hand. He had his head tipped back, eyes on the stars. "How're the boys?"

"Fine, fine. All these fucking bush leaguers around now. There's never anywhere to sit in the dugout."

"Yeah, things are tough all over." Lowry wasn't really fully engaged, and Haren could probably tell, his voice drawing shrewd.

"You call for any special reason?"

"Oh. Just checking in." Lowry kicked the low wall running along the edge of the roof, feeling lame and stunted. "And. Wanted to run something by you, I guess."

"'kay. That's usually a bad sign, but okay."

Lowry smiled, braced in anticipation of the wave of frustrated longing that Danny's tiredly affectionate tone always inspired, but then it didn't happen. He just felt very fond of Danny, and it didn't hurt at all.

He swallowed, shook his head. He couldn't be getting distracted now.

"I, well, here's a hypothetical situation. Say there's a guy on one team who maybe likes a guy on another team. I mean, _likes_ , you know. Um. These people aren't you and me, by the way."

Haren snorted softly. "You and me is half-right, though, isn't it."

Best to ignore that. "And say the guy being liked is not entirely opposed to being liked, okay. But he's concerned because, you know, baseball. They're always hundreds of miles apart. And, oh, the first guy, he's maybe sort of crazy and co-dependent. But he makes it kinda cute."

Lowry bit his tongue, cutting himself off. He'd let that go on a little long. He listened to Haren breathing, processing, and stared at the ivory shard of the Washington Monument spiking between the buildings.

"Well," Haren said after a moment. "Is the crazy guy's team going to the playoffs?"

Lowry shut his eyes, said truthfully, "No."

"So then you got the winter, starting ten days from now. You can try it out for real, see if it sticks. I mean, hypothetically you, of course."

"Hypothetically, I've thought of that. It wouldn't solve anything, because either it does stick and then he's even worse come next season, or it doesn't stick and. That would suck too."

There was something in Lowry's throat that he couldn't quite swallow past, his eyes kinda fuzzy and hot. He thought for a second that after a whole winter with Zito, neither of them would be in any shape to face the summer alone.

Haren was quiet for a second, then said with a weird unplaceable note in his voice, "You don't have a crush on me anymore, do you."

"It wasn't a _crush_ ," Lowry said too fast, catching his mistake as soon as Danny did.

"Wasn't," Haren echoed.

Lowry's mouth opened and closed a couple times, but what was he supposed to say? He examined the tight feeling in his heart, searching for that old well-loved gash and finding something pale and smooth like scar tissue instead. The world jolted under his feet, the stars jerking hard to the side, and Lowry had the most disorienting sensation careening through his mind, as if he'd woken up able to remember everything but his own name.

"You should be happy," he said, lower and rougher than he intended. Haren made a scoffing sound.

"I never _minded_ , Noah."

Hand on his face, Lowry dug his fingers into his eye, having trouble keeping up with all the stuff between the stuff they were saying out loud.

"Could you just tell me what to do, please."

"I already did, you shot me down. You want a list of stupid shit you could try?"

"Hey-"

"Who is it, man?"

Lowry pulled up short. "I, what? I'm not gonna tell you. I don't know who he wants told."

"Fuck that, you know I'm not gonna say anything to anybody. Best friend privilege, goddamn it." Haren paused. "Except that you really like him. And you'd feel bad about it because you're a girl. Jesus Christ."

"Okay, you know what, thanks for your help," Lowry said, wanting out of this conversation. "Think I got it from here."

"Wait, come on."

Lowry almost, _almost_ hung up on him, but it was Danny and it was like he was physically incapable. "What."

Haren sighed. "You give the game eight months out of every year. It's what you signed on for, you both knew going in. You deal with the schedule or you wait until retirement for the other part of your life to begin. Or you just sleep around a lot, but I wouldn't recommend that. Now you, you're a romantic. You'll do whatever it takes, and when that doesn't work, you'll wait. Crazy boy, all we know about him is that he's crazy. Which means he probably can't do either."

An air-filled laugh caught up in Lowry's throat. "You get less helpful the more you talk."

"Little out of my element here, I can admit it. I don't know what the fuck you want me to say."

Eyes shut, Lowry half-smiled. "It's okay, Danny. I wasn't really expecting any kind of easy answer."

Haren made a chuffing noise, exasperated. "You didn't really want one."

"No," Lowry agreed. "But thanks for trying, anyway."

Danny mumbled something that Noah didn't make out, and he could hear him taking a drink of something. He closed his eyes, felt a muted painless pull that threw him off for a second before he defined it, just wishing Danny were here in a normal best-friend kinda way.

He went back downstairs after saying goodnight to Haren, and paced the long hallways for awhile debating whether or not he should call Zito too. It felt like he'd arrived at some kind of conclusion but he knew that wasn't true. Zito wouldn't be able to help in any way, he only ever confused things.

The Giants played out the string, losing five in a row before winning the last of the year on a Brett Tomko complete game that came out of absolutely _nowhere_ , making everyone feel cheated in a vague way. They packed up their lockers and said their goodbyes and J.T. Snow was trying to pretend he wasn't crying, nine long years in San Francisco and not coming back. Lowry was depressed and there wasn't enough room in his bag for all the crap in his locker. His bobbleheads clinked together and he knew they'd shatter without insulation but he couldn't summon up the energy to care.

He got in his car in the underground parking garage, and just sat there for a minute, listening to the muffled sounds of his teammates calling to each other, waving out their SUV windows. Lowry rubbed his forehead, feeling kinda sick. He wasn't sure what to do with himself now, where he was supposed to go.

As it so often did these days, his unguided mind strayed back to Zito, wondering if the A's were still tied up in Seattle like they'd been on the out-of-town scoreboard. He pulled out of the parking garage so he could turn on the radio, just in time to hear Oakland wrap up a five-run rally in the eighth inning, and Lowry was smiling even though it kinda hurt, and he didn't want to think about why.

His apartment was dark and musty; three days home from the road and he still hadn't managed to open the curtains. It had matched his mood, obscure and stifling as he tried to figure out this thing with Zito, but now Lowry was itchy, his throat nervously tight. He tried to watch TV, tried screwing around on his computer, but nothing eased him, so he climbed out onto the fire escape, sunlight and wind pounding into him. He gasped, sucked in a deep breath, unused to the force. He squinted around, tears drawn to his eyes, checked to make sure no one was looking before he hiked himself up onto Danny's fire escape and jimmied the window open with his keys.

Lowry got a beer out of Haren's refrigerator, studying the junk magneted to the front. He wasn't sure why he'd broken in, pinned it on being sick of his own apartment and appreciating the Bizarro World nature of Haren's place, exact same layout but nothing was where it was supposed to be.

There was a messy pile of mail and other detritus on the kitchen table, Lowry's eyes catching the distinctive red-yellow of a photo pack from Walgreens. He glanced at the top sheet briefly to make sure they weren't naked photos of Danny's girlfriend or anything of the sort, and then dug in, guilt-free because if you couldn't invade your best friend's privacy, whose could you?

They were just a bunch of regular photos, anyway, nothing that Haren would care about Lowry seeing. Mugging with his cousins, rolling around in the grass with a pair of dogs Lowry didn't recognize, shots from the stands at a football game, a run of touristy pictures from New York City. Lowry settled in, smiling slightly, this new infection of nerves calmed out of him for a moment.

Just a moment, though, because the universe couldn't let things stay easy for longer than that, and Lowry flipped to a batch that was all Danny's teammates.

He flinched, open-faced lockers and guys half-dressed in their uniforms slouching around the clubhouse, Lowry stung suddenly with the tangible awareness that right now, two hours after the end of his last game of the season, this was as far away as he ever got from baseball. Four and a half months from Valentine's Day, half a year from throwing the next pitch that would actually matter, and he missed it so much that he thought he'd die, but then the urgency of the feeling ebbed and it became close to tolerable again.

Lowry leaned hard on his elbow on the table, hand jammed into his hair. Here was a picture of Eric Chavez and Mark Ellis building playing card pyramids on the floor, here was an action shot of Nick Swisher jumping on Joe Blanton's back, neon blue Gatorade exploding out of the bottle in Blanton's hand. Here was the Oakland bullpen engaged in some kind of intricate cup-stacking game, and then the aftermath when it came tumbling down, blown away in the wind.

Then there was a picture taken from a skewed side angle, no one in particular the focus, a candid shot of the A's after a game, hanging in small exhausted groups around the couches and chairs with little white plates from the spread in their hands. Lowry's eyes caught on Zito immediately, though he was way over at the edge of the shot and kinda blurry, the only one without anybody around him. Zito was hunched over his cell phone and Lowry knew the look on his face, that dreamily pained look that Zito wore around him so often, and he figured Zito was probably sending him his forty-seventh text message of the day. Zito wasn't smiling at all, his shoulders in a broken slump.

Noah set the photos down. He covered up that last one but it was too late, he was haunted by it already. He drank his beer dry, steady and slow, trying not to think about anything but that didn't really work either.

Zito wasn't okay. Lowry wondered if he'd ever been, thinking of how Zito's career had started, all meteoric and legendary, ludicrously good with nothing rational behind it, just faith and deception and a swan-diving curveball, and then he'd won the Cy Young and it had all started to fall apart. Lowry couldn't figure out if it was because Zito was fucked up that he'd lost his touch, or if he'd lost his touch and then became fucked up. The chronology wasn't important; either way, Zito had been like this for years.

So Zito wasn't okay and his thing for Noah was just more evidence of self-destructive tendencies, and Noah knew that, he could see it clear as the photograph. Fell in love with a National Leaguer, might as well be gone on a ghost.

Lowry's head spun, the beer hitting him, and he crumpled, resting his forehead on the table, cool slick wood and pain beating in his temples. Hollow feeling in his chest, this bizarre certainty that he was going to cry without even knowing why.

After awhile he picked himself up, put his empty bottle in the recycling bin under the sink and went back down the fire escape, shirt blown tight and thin as tissue paper against his body. Lowry ran on autopilot, getting his coat and keys and wallet, pulling a non-affiliated cap down low over his eyes. He went down and got in his car, found a radio station playing AC/DC and turned it up so loud his windows rattled. He drove over to Zito's apartment building wholly by muscle memory, having no memory of doing it once he'd arrived.

The sun was just beginning its nightly fall into the ocean. Lowry sat on the curb, rolling a baseball between his hands and watching the gold light sink down the sides of the buildings. He computed how long it'd take the A's to get out of Safeco, the commute to the airport and the length of the flight, numbers crowding into his mind and Lowry welcomed it, appreciating the immutability.

Zito showed up a couple hours later. Lowry had crossed to the bodega to get an apple and he was mostly done with it, gnawing at shreds, when a cab pulled up and Zito unfolded himself from within. Lowry's eyes went big and he was glad they were hidden by his cap brim. Zito looked like he hadn't slept in a week, hair messily unwashed and dull purplish bags under his eyes, his left arm held at an awkward dislocated angle.

Zito dropped his duffel and stood over him, took the apple core out of Noah's hand and winged it directly into the sewer across the street, and Noah was amazed and kinda heartbroken at the same time; when it didn't count Zito could still be exceptional.

He followed Zito upstairs without speaking. He kept staring at Zito, trying to find a way to say it that Zito would accept without a fight. Lowry really didn't think he was up for a fight.

Zito was listing, almost knocking into things and not realizing it, so Lowry put an arm around his shoulders and led him, stripped Zito's shirt off him once they were upstairs. sliding his hands up and across his ribs. Everything was tidied up, and Zito's bed was made because he had a cleaning lady come in when he was out of town, and Noah laid him down carefully on the smooth bedcover, struggling against a terrible sense of foreboding.

"I don't think this is doing either of us any good," he told Zito, and Zito nodded but that was because he didn't think Lowry was serious, and Lowry brushed the hair out of his eyes, wondered if he could smile and he pretty much could, just shaping his mouth.

"I was in love with Danny for a very long time," Noah continued, rough. "And I'm not anymore, and that's okay, but it's not really reason enough to keep barely seeing you."

It was nothing about Zito, he wanted to make that clear, but Zito broke in before he could, saying haltingly, "But the off-season," and then stopping dead.

Lowry smiled at him a little bit more for real this time, pushed his fingers over Zito's collarbones and up his neck, into his hair. Zito thought he'd be traded; everyone thought Zito would be traded. It seemed unthinkable that after everyone Billy Beane had dealt away, he would let Barry Zito stay all the way through to free agency.

He shook his head, got up to get undressed, eyes on Zito the whole time, wishing he were just a little bit less screwed up, wishing he could explain it right. They would have been good for each other. He would never in his life regret it. There were whole great swaths of Lowry that were crazy in love with Zito, and it was the nature of their business to starve that kind of halfway thing, wither it away to less than nothing. There had to be some way to get that across, but Lowry had never really been all that good with words.

"It's no one's fault," he said in a low tone that sounded wrecked to his own ears, and laid himself down on top of Zito's body, catching his mouth so he wouldn't have to hear his answer. It would only hurt them both, Lowry knew. He had to do this.

Zito groaned into the kiss, one arm around Lowry's neck, and his eyes were squeezed shut so tight it looked painful. Lowry kissed him again and again, hardly pausing for breath. He wanted to say that he was sorry but he couldn't, he'd fucking break down or something.

So he slept with Zito for the last time and wondered in some bleak part of his mind how many more people he was gonna fall for in his life, and would he ever be allowed to keep any of them?

It was really good sex, that time. Lowry wasn't sure why he'd been expecting different, maybe just that it was odd for his physical state to run so counter to his mental and emotional ones. But it felt like one of them was going off to war or something, some world-rending twist of fate that couldn't be helped. They clung to each other, rolled across the bed knotted together. Lowry said his name so many times his mouth went numb.

Afterwards, Zito's eyes were closed and his breath whistled between his teeth, his chest moving in hitches. Lowry sprawled along his side, chin on Zito's shoulder. He looked at him in the murky streetlight bleeding through the window, thinking that he wanted to remember him just exactly like this.

"Hey," Lowry said, and Zito's eyelids twitched, didn't open. Lowry smoothed his palm over Zito's hip. "I'm going to leave while you're still asleep."

Zito was still for a moment and then he gave the smallest nod, his lips pressing thin. Lowry petted his hip a few more times, liking the slope of it, the solid line of muscle.

"If I stay the night I don't think I'd leave in the morning," Lowry admitted. "And. It's not that I don't want to, Barry. You got that, right?"

A shrug to match the tiny nod that preceded it, Zito's shoulders flinching up. He didn't believe Lowry and Lowry could hardly blame him; he'd spent their relationship avoiding Zito's direct questions and playing at mysterious just for the hell of it.

Lowry pushed his face into Zito's throat, letting his eyes shut and breathing him in. "It's killing you, dude. I can't."

And Zito's chest jumped under Lowry's arm, a wretched moan mostly cut-off and then Zito saying with his voice like broken ice, "Lemme sleep, Noah, please."

They didn't see each other for a long time after that.

Lowry went home to Ventura trailed by a nagging throb in his forearm and a bad attitude that only festered in the endless sunlight, the nothingness of winter in Southern California. He had cause to drive into L.A. twice a week, the signs for Van Nuys arrayed over the highways as cruel taunts.

He didn't sleep much. He lay in bed with his eyes closed half the night, dazedly replaying scenes from his own life, unable to stop even though he was so tired, his bones feeling whittled and something stinging bright red in the forefront of his mind.

Four months ago he and Zito had traced a crooked corkscrew through the Mission District, the sunlight coated yolk-yellow and the sidewalks packed with people and fruit stands and ice cream carts. The long Saturday before the All-Star Game all soaked with heat and everybody speaking in Spanish and carrying their kids on their shoulders, the drug deals going down with cheerful efficiency, big grins and slick hand-to-hand transfers. Lowry and Zito had just kept walking for hours and hours, five blocks one way and two blocks up and then doubling back, staying on the sunny side of the street, ducking into taquerias for aguas frescas and bakeries for conchas, hot and soft out of the oven with the pink sugar crumbling on their hands. Talking about nothing that Lowry would ever be able to remember, flicking a baseball back and forth idly, laughing so hard he had to hold on to Zito to keep from falling down.

Lowry went around and around in his mind, wishing there had been wet cement for them to press their hands into, something he could visit like a grave.

He kept up with trade rumors as obsessively as if he were the one on the block. Zito was mentioned every other day, tantalizing bits of backroom gossip that had Lowry praying for the National League West; he saw those guys all the time and they were all close enough for day trips. Then he caught himself, clicked fast out of the browser like he could chase all that false hope away. He couldn't be thinking like that; it wasn't an actual solution.

The Giants were never mentioned in the Zito trade talks. This was because all Billy Beane wanted in return was good young pitching and Brian Sabean, though not very smart, was certainly not brain damaged enough to offer up his team's future, having learned his lesson with Joe Nathan and Francisco Liriano. Lowry was mostly relieved; he didn't think he'd be able to handle it if those infuriatingly nebulous rumors had revolved around his ideal scenario.

But he was trying to get his head back together and get over this whole mess, which involved a fair amount of fucking around and the kind of drinking Lowry had never really had time to get to in college. There were a lot of different kinds of Scotch in the world, and a lot of tall guys with soft brown hair too, and Lowry already had extensive experience in the mechanics of substitution.

Zito still hadn't been traded when the Giants signed Lowry to a four-year deal worth better than nine million dollars, which kinda took the wind out of his sails and left him limp with a mild case of shock. All his friends started handling him with awkward care, but he didn't think too much of it because he knew he was acting out of character right now, bruised and defensive, surprised to find himself alone at the beach just in time for sunset.

A couple days before they were due in Phoenix, Lowry and Haren got into the worst fight they'd ever had.

It was unexpected; they'd been less involved in each other's lives since Danny and Jessica had gotten engaged and Lowry had started wanting to beat up every happy couple he saw. Lowry went out to West Covina on Haren's promise of dollar shots and no fiancées, still kinda hungover when he started drinking again. Things were going well, history and chemistry crackling between them and reminding Lowry that there was still good on the earth.

But then late that night they went to a diner to get some food and coffee and sober up enough to drive home, and Haren asked:

"You gonna tell me who that guy was now?"

Lowry recoiled, his reaction overdone because of the drunk, knocking a fork onto the floor. He blinked at Danny a few times, stricken and feeling pale. Danny just nodded, pointed at him with his eyes all gauzy and half-focused.

"See, 'cause obviously it's over, right? So no point keepin' secrets anymore. Not that you ever had a point, not from me." Haren grinned encouragingly. "So who was he?"

Lowry felt his face heat, his hands close into fists under the table. He wasn't going to tell Danny. He didn't want to tell Danny, and it wasn't only because Zito might not appreciate it. This heartbreak was _his_ , belonged to him as sure as the heart itself.

He refused, tight-lipped and flushing, and Haren pestered for a few minutes before getting annoyed and giving up momentarily, glaring balefully at Lowry as they finished their food in a less-than-companionable silence.

Haren brought it up again walking back to the bar where Lowry's car was parked. He played the best friend card and Lowry wished he would stop doing that.

He said, "Drop it, Danny, fucking _drop it_ ," over and over with his voice climbing, but Haren had his hooks in it now and he wasn't letting up, demanding, "What's so bad that I can't know it, why the fuck don't you trust me," and Lowry, still drunk despite the flapjacks, shoved Haren so hard he tripped over the curb and fell.

Lowry watched Haren's elbow crack into the pavement in slow-motion horror, saw Haren's mouth warp in sudden pain. Grotesque images of shattered bones piercing skin filled his mind, and there would be surgeries and months of rehab and then Haren would still not be able to pitch and it would all be Lowry's fault. He saw it all in about a second and a half, a ghastly plausible version of the future.

Haren curled up around his arm and snarled when Lowry came to him stumbling and apologetic, "Get the _fuck_ away," and Lowry jerked backwards, almost falling himself.

He watched helpless as Haren screwed his eyes shut and fought back the most immediate agony. He probably wasn't permanently disabled, but it did sound like he was starting to hate Noah, which might have been fair.

"You shoulda just told me, you didn't have to-" and Haren bit his teeth together, wrenched his head. There were lines of pain sketched all over his face. "I got a right to know, 'cause it means something, you, you do. You always have and you never see it."

Lowry shook his head, no idea what the fuck Haren was talking about and nausea crawling in his stomach, the sidewalk slewing under his feet. He never should have come out here tonight.

"I can't, Danny, you gotta let it go," Lowry begged. "It was like being fuckin' ripped open, and I, I just can't."

Haren clambered to his feet, clutching his arm to his chest and sneering at Lowry, not caring what it did to him. "I _know_ what he's done to you, Noah, do you think I'm fucking blind? That's why I want to know his motherfucking _name_."

Lowry shook his head again, kept jerking it side to side and backing up unsure and staggering. His hands were held up, beseeching.

"Can't, I'm sorry," he barely managed, and then he turned away, half-sprinted back to the bar and his car and tried not to feel like the worst person in the world as he ditched Danny, just ran the fuck away.

Getting back to baseball was a cold relief. Somewhere to go every day, and if he ran the track long enough, if he took cuts in the cage until his sides ached and his arms were three times heavier than normal, if he pitched and pitched and pitched, he'd be worn out enough to sleep the night through, and if that didn't work, he only had to ask the team doctor for sleeping pills. Lowry liked the deadened Halcion sleep, visionless and thick. He was sick of the vibrant colors of July following him into February dreams.

Lowry didn't call Haren and Haren didn't call him. Sometimes he got empty voicemails from blocked numbers, and he suspected Zito, a certain tautness in his chest giving it away. Lowry didn't even erase them, sliding closer to pathetic with every passing day.

Spring training ended and they went back to San Francisco. Lowry started the home opener, third game of the year, and he got two outs in the second before feeling something tear viciously in his side, muscle rent from bone. He cried out, sent a pitch sailing into the net.

He couldn't even stand up straight when the trainers came out, hunched over sideways, mouth pulled in a grimace. He knew before they took him to the medical center that he would hit the DL for the first time in his career, just five outs into the season. It seemed only natural; everything else was falling apart too.

But then six hours after the news of Lowry's injury broke online, Haren showed up at his door with two sixers and a guardedly regretful mien.

Lowry stood in the doorway blinking dumbly for a long moment, until Haren rolled his eyes and shoved past him. Lowry followed him into the kitchen where Haren was unloading the beers into the refrigerator and casing Noah's food. He glanced back at Lowry, hesitated for a second.

"Sorry about that shit earlier. Beer?" Haren offered one at the end of his arm, dim cautious look on his face. Lowry took it, baffled.

"Um. Aren't you supposed to be in Seattle?"

Haren shook his head, leaned back against the counter. "Not pitching till Minnesota, so they said I could take a couple days, go visit my sick uncle."

Lowry blinked dumbly some more, eyebrows climbing high. Haren smirked at him.

"So how ya feelin', unc?"

"Fine," Lowry answered on autopilot, never mind that he couldn't bend or stretch or reach or generally move without pain. He drank some of his beer, trying to adjust himself to Danny's sudden reoccurrence, thinking that he must be missing something. "What shit were you apologizing for?"

Haren shrugged, eyebrows lowered. "Shouldn't've pushed you about that guy. You shouldn't've pushed me, either, in a much more literal way, but yeah. Your business is your business."

Lowry nodded, but he felt slow and scared, curling his hands around the beer. He couldn't meet Haren's eyes and he fumed at himself, cowardly little _bitch_.

"Thanks, I, uh. Thanks," Lowry said. "And, you know, I'm sorry too."

Nodding like all was right with the world again, Haren took a long drink from his beer, and then launched into a monologue about the goddamn New York Yankees and their goddamn pinstripes. Lowry moved gingerly to sit at the table, nodding along and pitching in hmms and oh yeahs when it seemed appropriate. He experienced an almost overwhelming urge to blurt out, _Zito, it's Zito_ , but biting the inside of his lip bloody mostly cured him of that.

They retired to the living room, drank a few beers each. Danny didn't ask him about his injury and for that Noah was deeply thankful. They weren't wholly comfortable with each other again, but they were getting there, and Lowry was confused--everything was supposed to be falling apart.

Then Danny was saying goodnight and stumbling to the door, flapping his hand behind him and showing Noah a series of disjointed grins. Lowry trailed behind, righting Haren when he canted too much one direction or the other.

"Hoo, so I'll see you tomorrow, yeah? Madden, yeah?" Haren asked, and Lowry nodded along. Haren patted the side of Lowry's head, smiled at him foggy and honest. "Gonna be great, you'll see. Gotta buck up. Get over your crazy boy and then you won't look so sad anymore, an' it'll be so great, Noah, fuckin' swear it will."

Noah was shocked silent, and he barely summoned up a bent little smile, got Haren out of his place and threw all three locks, slumping against the door with both hands over his face. Lowry breathed out hot and rushed against the heels of his hands, fingers set against his eyes. He thought he'd been passing, at the very least. He hadn't thought people could _see_ it.

But Danny wasn't people. Lowry needed a better game face, or possibly some different friends. He shook his head hard, dug into his eye sockets until he wanted to scream. He needed to get over his crazy boy, that was all.

Lowry's time on the disabled list passed like a prison stay, deadly bored every day and locked into rigid routines. He gave himself little tasks to do, made his bed each morning and reorganized his DVD collection once a week, walked down to the waterline after day games to watch the sunset bleed fire through the Golden Gate Bridge. When the team was out of town, he only spoke to cashiers and the rare fan who stopped him on the street. After a couple of weeks of this, Lowry worried that he was becoming a sociopath, and rented _Brian's Song_ and _Field of Dreams_ to make sure he could still cry (double check).

He wasn't traveling with the team, seven- and ten-day stretches spent mostly alone and trying to ignore the awareness of the Oakland Athletics at home across the bay, the ring of white stadium lights visible from the bridge and the tops of San Francisco's highest hills, if the night was clear and you knew where to look. The A's game flipped past when Lowry was channel-surfing and he jerked like he'd been burned, every single time.

By the time they started letting him throw again, Lowry had learned how to pitch through all kinds of pain.

The season passed, a distinct feeling of mediocrity in every aspect of it. The Giants hovered within a game or two of .500 for most of the season, dipping below and rising above in steady shallow waves, and then everyone ran out of gas in the dog days of late summer, faltering and wilting in the heat. Lowry's mechanics were all fucked up from being hurt and favoring his bad side unconsciously, and in September his elbow gave out, a gory snapping sound that Lowry could _hear_ , putting him back on the shelf for the rest of the season. He spent the better part of six weeks whacked out on painkillers, resurfaced just in time to see the Oakland Athletics get swept for the pennant.

Lowry hadn't seen much of Danny that year, just an ever-more-infrequent exchange of emails and text messages. He read Haren's blog, and Zito's too, because he was some kind of ridiculous masochist and he hadn't had enough yet. Zito's in particular was almost painstakingly cleaned up for public consumption, but Noah could see the gaps in his stories, the strange unexplained contexts of so many of his interactions. Zito wrote a lot about how he was feeling good on the mound, feeling like he'd really started to sort things out, and Lowry could tell that was a bald-faced lie.

But here the A's were playing in the championship series, and they were showing clips of Zito out-dueling Johan Santana in the first round, and Lowry was star-struck, drunk and dazzled on too much sleep, that cleanly determined look on Zito's pretty face.

That game in Minnesota was maybe Zito's last best moment. The Tigers kicked the shit out of them for the pennant, and now Zito didn't play for Oakland anymore. He'd made it through to free agency against all odds, and so the bidding began.

Lowry couldn't believe the estimates being thrown around for the contract that Zito would sign. Noah was more than a little bit in love with the guy and even he didn't really think Zito was worth a hundred million dollars, or at least, not as a pitcher.

Five times a day, something happened or some thought occurred to Lowry and he'd wish he could tell Zito about it. He wished he could hear from Zito how the negotiations were going, the directions in which he was leaning. Everyone kept talking about the Mets, and that was probably for the best, get him as far away as physically possible and maybe Lowry would be able to recover then.

And then, two days before New Year's, the San Francisco Giants signed Zito for $126 million.

Lowry was sure he was dreaming. The news broke bright-red on the ticker scrolling along at the bottom of ESPN, and Lowry thought he must have seen it wrong. He got his laptop and checked the websites and it wasn't possible, it must have been a dream. It was the biggest contract signed by any pitcher in history. It was the answer to a prayer that Lowry had never even had enough faith to send. It didn't make any _sense_.

He slapped himself hard across the face. He went and looked in the bathroom mirror at the handprint blooming on his cheek, and something about the soft flush on his face, the hectic gleam in his own eyes, convinced him that it was true.

Lowry scrambled for his phone, muting the television where Zito threw curve after perfect curve. He called Danny Haren, his heart jittering and climbing into his throat.

"Noah!"

"Danny, where are you?" Lowry said fast. "Can you talk?"

Haren's voice dropped and became abruptly serious. "Yeah man, I'm just coming home from the store. Are you okay?"

"No. Or, maybe. I dunno." Lowry scrubbed a hand across his face, took a ragged breath. "It was Zito."

"What?"

"My. The guy. The crazy one. I couldn't tell you because it was Zito."

Haren inhaled sharply. " _Barry_ Zito?" Lowry rolled his eyes, but that was only reflex, and then Haren was saying too loud, " _You're_ the one who fucked him up! Oh my god, I totally should have figured this out."

He was taking it altogether better than Lowry had hoped. It didn't help the wild jumping feeling in his chest, this free-fall.

"I had to, I didn't want to," Lowry tried to explain, the whole argument seeming weak suddenly. "He, it meant too much to him, he was drowning."

"How long has this shit being going on?"

"Um, since June last year. And then I ended it in October but it was too late, he was already too far gone."

"I knew it, I knew something happened over the off-season. He came back so screwed up, never told me anything. I figured it was some guy, never guessed it was some _ballplayer_."

Lowry winced, not liking how Haren spat it like a curse. "I had to," he repeated feebly.

"Oh yeah?" Haren asked, weird tone in his voice as if his loyalties had suddenly become strained and uncertain. "'cause it sounds like you're still screwed up over him, too, or else why did you call?"

"Danny, Jesus, you haven't heard?" Lowry shut his eyes, still badly thrown. "He just signed with the Giants. Seven years, 126 mil."

Haren choked. " _What?_ "

"Forget the numbers, he signed with _my team_ ," Lowry said, franticness fraying the edge of the words. "What the hell am I supposed to do now?"

"Are you joking?" Haren asked, still rife with disbelief.

" _No_ ," Lowry responded urgently, needing Haren to understand. This development had completely upended the world. "I'm gonna see him every day."

"Isn't that a good thing? Thought being on different teams was the whole problem."

"I," and Lowry stopped, crashed headlong into a brick wall and bounced back reeling, delirious. A rush of images flooded through him, having breakfast in hotel restaurants with Zito still in his pajamas, dogpiling after a walk-off win with Zito on his back, sleeping slumped against each other in the back row of the team plane, every day, every single day.

He was terrified. Look how much damage they'd done to each other after only four months. They were both crazy now.

"Noah?" Danny said when he'd been quiet too long, and Noah made some tiny huff of acknowledgement. Danny took a moment just breathing, then said, "You gonna go see him?"

Lowry shook his head immediately, biting his lip. "He's gonna have so much going on-"

"He's not gonna care, why the fuck do you think he did it?"

Lowry's heart thudded unevenly, jarred right out of place. "No, it was the money, that, that's fuck-you money for three generations-"

"No, man."

It was very strange; Danny sounded almost sad.

"It was you, Noah. The money, the money's going to destroy him and he knows that. He was so fucking scared all year, none of us knew what to do. No part of him wants this except the part that feels like he's supposed to."

"That doesn't mean it was 'cause of me."

"Kinda does. You should go see him."

"Danny-"

"No, fuck it," Haren said, voice cracking and hoarse but so sure for all of that, plain as the sky. "No more excuses outta you. Hang up the phone and go get your boy."

Lowry closed his eyes. He pressed the phone hard against his face, concentrating on the feel of it, pressure against his cheekbone, denting into his temple. It wasn't reasonable for his luck to turn this quickly, it wasn't like momentum shifting dugouts on a single pitch, and Lowry didn't want to trust the loosening feeling in his chest, the awed hush in his mind.

"Yeah," he said in a whisper, and then again, "Yeah," a louder echo.

He was at least going to try.

It took him the better part of two days to screw his courage to the sticking point and get himself out to the Hollywood address Danny had given him. He couldn't call Zito first, it wasn't the type of thing he could say over the phone, and so he loitered around for most of an afternoon, pacing the sidewalks and leaning on his shoulder on a lamppost. It felt like he'd spent his whole life watching and waiting, bearing witness to the sun setting over the ocean like it meant something, his instincts cued to the future, the moment when Zito would finally appear, and Lowry thought again and again, _every day_.

It was New Year's Eve and firecrackers rattled and rang from other streets, the dim sound of backyard-barbecue laughter rising over the houses. Lowry remembered when he was a kid and he'd loved New Year's as much as Christmas, the idea that the world was new at midnight and so were you.

Zito came home slump-shouldered, dragging. He looked beaten around the eyes and wary, moving slowly towards Lowry, as if he were maybe an apparition of some kind. Lowry studied him, his throat closing up and something dissolving in his chest. He wasn't just halfway in love with Zito. He wasn't just a bystander to this catastrophe.

"So," Lowry said, and pulled off his cap, showing Zito his face and smiling at him. "You gonna invite me in?"

Zito took the cap out of Noah's hand and smashed it against his hip. He had a hunted look on his face, his throat ducking fast, eyes darting. There was a line pressed into his forehead that Lowry wanted to feel under his fingers. Zito looked miserable, and Lowry was taken aback, a shiver of doubt running through him. He'd gotten it all wrong, him and Danny both; Zito didn't want him here.

But Zito only snapped the cap brim and dropped it on the sidewalk, twisted his key in the lock and held the door open for Lowry. Lowry brushed close by him, felt Zito suck in a fast breath.

They went upstairs without speaking, and Lowry followed Zito into the kitchen, took a seat at the table watching the other man pull down a pair of glasses and a bottle of Scotch. Lowry figured that was probably about right, and accepted the drink Zito made even though it was strong enough to strip paint off the walls. Zito took the seat across from him, gazing down at the glass cradled in his hands. There was a discomfited stain of red on his face, something like shame but that couldn't be right, what did Zito have to be ashamed about?

No good toasts occurred to Lowry, so he sipped his drink unchristened, flicking glances at Zito and giving him a chance to talk first but Zito declined.

"Danny thinks you signed with the Giants 'cause of me," Lowry offered, and then sat back, mildly appalled at himself. He hadn't intended to just say it out of the blue like that.

Zito twitched backwards, his eyes getting big. "Danny knows?"

"Since two days ago." Lowry scratched at the back of his neck. "Um, sorry about that. I don't know if you wanted-"

"Whatever." Zito scowled down at his drink, his lip curling up. "Is that what you think too?"

"I don't know, man. I haven't talked to you in a really long time."

"Whose fault was that?"

"Hey, come on." Lowry kicked Zito's feet under the table, trying to get him to look at him, but Zito refused, gaze trained stubbornly away. Crossing his fingers against his leg, Lowry said haltingly, "If. If that was the reason you signed. I might be kinda interested to hear that."

There was a frozen span of time, brief and epic at once, and then Zito lifted his head slowly, his eyes cracking into Lowry's. Zito looked scared out of his mind, shaking, and he scanned Lowry's face feverishly. The inside of Lowry's cheek tasted of copper, shivering from the effort of meeting Zito's gaze.

"Why?" Zito asked softly. Lowry shook his head, swallowing hard.

"Because I'd do the same. Wherever you were, that's where I'd go."

Zito didn't react right away, and the moment stretched, spun out around them like rings dilating in water. Lowry held perfectly still, a litany of ill-formed prayers running in his mind, two pairs of fingers crossed on each hand. He watched, breath netted in his lungs, as the dismal shadow cleared glacially off Zito's face.

Zito flashed a hesitant fraction of a smile, shielded and defensive, and asked, "Really?"

There was a weak thread of hope woven through his voice, light coming up in his eyes, and Lowry knocked over his chair getting to his feet, clumsy and dumbstruck and not caring because Zito was starting to laugh in incredulous astonishment, tipping his face up. Lowry fisted his hands in Zito's shirt and hauled him up, shoving him against the wall and kissing the stupid grin off his face. Zito took Lowry's head in his hands, kissed him right back.

It wasn't sweet yet, something feral in the way Zito held on to him, panic still driving through his eyes, but that was only the history. Zito didn't really trust Lowry and Lowry couldn't blame him, but he thought if he could just keep showing his face every single day, turning up like a bad penny on Zito's doorstep, following him around wherever he went--it'd get through to him eventually.

And it would be okay, Noah caught himself thinking as they stumbled to the bedroom, tied up in each other and tripping over nothing. It might take months to convince Zito, maybe even years, but they had time now, so much it made Lowry's head spin. Calendar pages snowed down in his mind, burying the two of them like an avalanche, and somewhere in there was the day that Zito would believe him, and they'd be all right then.

Lowry pictured that perfect day, all crowded with wind and color and joyful noise, Mexican sunlight as thick as oil. He closed his eyes as Zito touched his mouth to the birthmark on his face, and he could see it all.

THE END


End file.
